Written by Erin Davis, Photo courtesy of IMDB
Sometimes in the age of countless streaming services, Netflix binging and formulaic marvel releases every other month, we forget what film is. Film is memory.
It is a fragment of time preserved and archived so that a decade or a century from now, the people that follow us can know who we were. “One Child Nation,” directed by Nanfu Wang and Lynn Zhang, is a grim, beautiful reminder of that.
The film opens with the introduction of China’s now-notorious One Child Policy, introduced in 1980 and ending in 2015. However, it ends with detailing all the ways the policy introduced decades of suffering to an entire generation.
It hones in on China’s use of propaganda, which, along with brute force, was their means to population control. It was plastered all over village walls and schools, injected into music and television and art. But it was a pale charade of what the policy actually was, and how it affected lives. From forced sterilizations and abortions to abandoning children, often girls, on the streets, human tracking to taking children from homes, the policy was the catalyst for decades of cruelty.
The film pieced together the lives of so many: mothers and fathers, officials, human traffickers and family. One long, venomous string connects them all, a common narrative that resonated in each story. “There was nothing I could do.” In this way, the film brilliantly breaks down the victim-perpetrator narrative, questioning preconceived notions of personal accountability in the face of tyranny and terror.
What makes the film even more interesting is its personal context. The director’s family were not only key parts of the film’s narrative, but she also shot the film over the duration of time she was pregnant, and mother to a young son. “Becoming a mother felt like giving birth to memories,” Nanfu Wang recalled in the film’s beginning moments.
This touches on the central idea of this “One Child Nation”— collective memory, and perhaps the legacies of sin we leave behind with our children. If we teach them nothing, we become nothing. We forget, and history repeats.
Nothing cements this more than “One Child Nation’s” final moments. The camera cuts to Wang’s grandfather, survivor to decades of the policy, watching televised propaganda. It is the introduction of China’s newly put in place 2 Child Policy, meant to counteract an aging population.
Traces of the One Child Policy are now being erased, from screens to walls to history books. Soon, its only memory will be that belonging to the generation who lived through it. And even though it’s a dreary thought, I think Wang’s film is an essential part of archiving that memory and teaching a new generation about the wrongs of the past.
